Chapter 6
Leena
The yellow one-and-a-half-story house with a quaint little porch, and a red door on a quiet street lined with houses that look just like it, wasn’t what I was expecting. Or rather, I had no expectations for the house.
I just wasn’t expecting to be carried across the threshold of my new house by my new husband and be greeted with a stench that is straight from hell.
I’m trying to figure out who Abby is, when I realize that the smears covering the walls, the hardwood floors, the furniture inside, aren’t some random chocolate meltdown.
I nearly gag and, despite how annoyed I am that the Neanderthal thought he could rip my dress in half, drop me on his bike, and manhandle me into the house, I turn my face into his broad, warm chest to escape the smell.
Wraith turns right back around, a full-on pivot with that long stride that would have made my high school basketball coach proud. He stalks silently into the warm night and then his arms shift and he sets me firmly down onto the porch.
I whirl and catch sight of his burning dark eyes. “Stay here,” he commands, but his lips edge up at the corners.
He slams his way back inside, leaving me standing there, open mouthed, in a strange neighborhood, after the most horrendous day of my life.
The lost little girl part of myself, that scared, insecure being that lives inside of me, urges me to wrap my arms around myself protectively.
I do, rubbing my arms like it’s cold out, even though the humidity is so thick that it nearly unravels my curls.
It plasters my hair to my forehead and my skin feels damp, like I’ve just stepped from the shower.
The house is kind of cute, even though I don’t want to admit it.
At least from the outside. The little porch with the overhang fronts a symmetrical building—two windows, one on either side of the door.
It’s actually quite picturesque, as though a young, artsy woman was responsible for the choice.
I mean, the place has a red door. What guy picks out something like that?
Unease knots in my stomach as I go back to what he said when we arrived. Who the hell is Abby? Something sharp and achy wedges up in my chest, nearly stealing my breath. Abby… a house full of poop smeared all over—it seems like something a child would do.
Surely someone would have told me if today I wasn’t just becoming a wife, but also a mother of sorts? And who was looking after her? Did he leave her alone?
My head swims and I have to take a step forward and blink hard against the blackness edging in at the corners. My hand grips the wood railing, and I curl my fingers around it, letting my nails bite into the wood painfully in order to ground myself.
All I can do is stand out there and take large gulps of air.
I try to force myself to think about my sisters.
How they’re going to find their new lives.
The beast picked me up so fast at the hall, that I left everything behind.
My backpack in the room we had to get dressed in.
My duffel bag of clothes in my father’s truck and my boxes of things in my brother’s.
I guess I’ll have to deal with it in the morning. Right now, I don’t even have a phone. I left my purse back in that room, under the stack of clothes I wore to the hall before we were forced to put on this sham of a wedding.
Stephanie seemed happy enough with her man.
The light-haired, gentle faced Wing was completely captivated by her.
Thinking about their easy, shy smiles undoes a few of those tightly coiled knots in my belly.
When I think about Ami, though, her dark-haired groom passed out at the table for everyone to see, Ami looking like she’d rather cut and run than go home with him…
I just hope that she can get it figured out.
We don’t need any kind of trouble. Not between our clubs.
I want to laugh out into the night, into the rows of darkened houses, the light leaking out behind closed blinds to alleviate the inky black.
One streetlight stands on the corner, casting a bronze glow onto the crumbling asphalt street below.
I wonder if it would take notice, if I laughed.
If there would be anyone to hear me and peek out the window and wonder about the wide eyed, frantic looking woman standing in a torn wedding dress looking like it’s her funeral, not the happiest day of her life.
I hate my father at the moment. There have been many times over the years when I detested him.
When I wanted to snap and snarl and fight back against his rule.
When I wanted to push back, lash out, scream and rage.
Instead, I saved my tears for my pillow every night, where I could release my emotions in private.
But this—using his daughters, his own flesh and blood, for this alliance, threatening us with the repercussions of war and people getting hurt if we didn’t agree—it’s too much.
I let my frustration at the unknown get the better of me.
I don’t want to be some spineless thing forced into this new life.
I don’t want to cower away. I want to face it head on.
This is the first chance I’ve had to be out from under my father’s thumb.
I’m not going to let another man rule me the way he did.
I’m going to stand up for myself. Take charge…
Head held high, I storm back into the house to find out who the hell Abby is. Whatever awaits me in there, I’d rather know now, than stand out here, speculating about it, letting my mind run wild and letting panic claw its way into control.
The smell is still terrible, though it’s abated, like Wraith opened a few windows.
I don’t find him cleaning up. Instead, I round the corner from the entrance into the living room and find Wraith bent over at the corner. I can just make out the edge of something pale sticking out and I march over.
If that’s how he treats his daughter, standing over her and scaring her like a black robed grim reaper of the night, I have something to say about it.
I slam my hands to my hips and just as I’m ready to lay into him, I get close enough to peer over his shoulder and my words stick in my throat.
Because it’s not a child at all.
And Wraith isn’t trying to intimidate her or scare her.
One big palm rests on the shoulders of a cream-colored dog, tan with darker brown splotches.
She’s shaking violently, her head down on the floor between her front paws.
Her bottom end is dirty, confirming she is indeed the poop culprit, and it doesn’t take me long to figure out why.
My eyes stray down to her back legs, but they’re all wrong.
They’re stringy, that kind of useless look that muscles get when they don’t have a purpose.
They flop uselessly beside her, and I realize that she can’t use them.
Wraith keeps one hand on the dog’s trembling body and with the other, he gently smooths over her silky looking ears.
I sneak a glance at his face, and all the breath rushes out of my lungs.
He undoes me, with the gentle concentration there, his bottom lip worried between his top teeth, his eyes burning with love and compassion.
He’s so fierce, but so gentle too, that it makes my heart stop.
It restarts with a thud that shocks me. Wraith doesn’t have one of those faces anyone would call beautiful.
It’s too ruggedly masculine for that, but in that moment, he looks wondrous. Enough to take my breath away.
Because the lost little part of myself, the part of myself that was never truly loved or wanted by either of my parents, wants someone to look at me that way. Look at me like for the first time, I’m really being seen. Look at me like I’m treasured beyond everything imaginable.
His dark eyes sweep to me, and I’m struck by their tenderness.
“This is Abby,” he says softly, his voice as beautiful as that tender expression.
“Her back legs are paralyzed. She has a wheelchair, but I don’t put that on her when I’m gone, because if she tips over, it can be hard for her to get it righted.
She’s used to scooting around the house.
It’s easy for her, on the wood floors. She wears a diaper, but I guess it came off. ”
I blink. This is not at all what I expected. “Why- why is she shaking?”
Wraith’s shoulders heave with his breath.
His face changes, contorts with rage when he faces me, his eyes becoming nothing less of fearsome, and the perverse part of me, something I didn’t know existed, the animal part of me, embraces that dark rage.
I want him to be spurred to that black protectiveness for me too.
That look that says he’d kill anyone who hurt Abby.
“She came from a shelter. Kind of. They got a call about a bastard who beat his dog all the time. He’d do it in the fucking front yard for the whole neighborhood to see.
One day he laid into her. Beat her so bad she wasn’t moving.
Left her out there to die. A woman who lived a few houses over finally couldn’t take that shit anymore.
She called the cops and they got animal protection involved.
They took her away from the bastard, but they were too late.
Never fucking did a thing until she was paralyzed.
He kicked her so hard he broke her spine.
“They were gonna put her down, but that lady who called checked in on her and said she’d take her and find her a home.
She helped raise money for her surgeries online, for the care she needed.
No one knew what her name was, but that lady, her name was Nicole, she thought Abby sounded nice. It stuck.”